The approval of a new ASTM International standard, E 2555, Practice for Factors and Procedures for Applying the MIL-STD-105 Plans in Life and Reliability Inspection, represents the latest work of a task group that is converting a series of U.S. Department of Defense standards into ASTM documents. The task group is part of Subcommittee E11.30 on Data Analysis, which is under the jurisdiction of ASTM International Committee E11 on Quality and Statistics. The task group is chaired by Edward Schilling, professor emeritus, RIT; Dean Neubauer, senior engineering associate — Statistical Engineering, Corning, Inc.; and Stephen Luko, statistician, Pratt & Whitney.

E 2555 presents a procedure and related tables of factors for adapting sampling plans in E 2234, Practice for Sampling a Stream of Product by Attributes Indexed by AQL, to acceptance sampling inspection when the item quality of interest is life length or reliability. E 2234 is an equivalent to MIL-STD-105, Sampling Procedures and Tables for Inspection by Attributes. E 2555 is the equivalent of Technical Report 7, Factors and Procedures for Applying the MIL-STD-105 Plans in Life and Reliability Inspection.

While the DoD documents have been used as the basis for several ISO standards, some of the technical content has been changed in the ISO versions. Since it was felt in many quarters that the DoD documents continued to perform the service for which they were intended, Subcommittee E11.30 is working to preserve them as ASTM standards in their original form.

“The Department of Defense sampling standards go back to the 1950s and ‘60s and were widely employed in numerous industries,” says Stephen Luko, chair-elect of Committee E11. “Our effort is to preserve these standards in their original form. No change to substance is being made except for any corrections where warranted, and some small improvements in table and equation formatting.” Some formatting changes are also required to meet ASTM International’s form and style guide.

The DoD standards task group is now working on draft standard WK11023, which is based on the DoD’s H108, Sampling Procedures and Tables for Life and Reliability Testing (Based on Exponential Distribution). Interested parties who are familiar with acceptance sampling and are willing to participate in the writing process and/or in table/graphics development are invited to join in the activities of the task group.